Page 24 - Aldi Lukman Nurhakim_How to Write Critical Esays: A Guide for Students of Literature

Facing the question 23
essentially political stance. Your prose may be quietly insisting
that the present forms of society are so admirably fair that they
should be conserved rather than challenged.
Your essay may anyway imply that texts which argue a point
of view about slavery—or indeed any other economic system—
are not likely to be among the great works of art on which
criticism should concentrate. In judging a work of literature, or
in trying to identify its central meaning, we should focus,
according to some critics, on far more important topics than
social injustice: ultimately politics do not matter; personal
feelings—which are supposedly unaffected by political
structures—do. But this idea may itself be highly political. If
people of vastly different wealth and power were still liable to
suffer much the same pain and could still manage to enjoy
much the same pleasure, would there be any great point in
struggling for social reform? Where the same essential, enduring
human experiences are already equally available to all, why
change the circumstances in which some of us still have to live?
Let us suppose, for instance, that early productions of
Hamlet affected all members of the audience in much the same
way; that even the most socially disadvantaged felt as
sympathetic to the hero as did the most privileged. Both
groups might then have seen class warfare as utterly
irrelevant. Pauper and prince might feel that their real enemies
were not each other but those supposedly universal problems
which pose an equal threat to everyone’s happiness and sanity:
loneliness, for instance, or fear of death, or a despairing sense
that love never lasts and existence has no ultimate point or
purpose.
If the play was originally valued for such meanings, it may
have played its own small part in preventing progress. It may
have helped to delay that recognition of conflicting interests
which eventually led ordinary men and women to demand the
vote, and so gain some chance of influencing the ways in which
they were governed.
Let us assume that you believe in democracy and accept at
least the possibility that Hamlet has had that kind of negative
influence in the past. How far should such considerations
determine your own present choices as to what meanings in the
play your interpretation should foreground and what qualities
your evaluation should praise?